Albany County disputes $7M bill

Issue is how years of litigation should be compensated

By Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

Published 10:51 pm, Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Albany

Albany County is asking a federal judge to throw out the entire $7 million legal bill submitted by the lawyers who sued to invalidate the county's 2011 redistricting map, calling the request "grotesque" and potentially illegal.

In a blistering motion filed in U.S. District Court, County Attorney Thomas Marcelle argues that to even consider the lawyers' request would only encourage others to make similar "intolerably inflated" demands "beyond all known precedent."

Failing that, the county argues the lawyers are entitled to no more than $240,000 — roughly one-29th what they asked for.

The filing accuses the firms Gibson Dunn and DerOhannesian & DerOhannesian of, among other things, inappropriately charging full legal rates for travel time, billing "thousands of dollars" for "unrelated cases" and routinely overstaffing depositions and conferences to train junior lawyers.

Gibson Dunn is an international firm with offices in New York City; DerOhannesian & DerOhannesian is located on Broadway in Albany.

In one instance cited by the county, five Gibson Dunn lawyers billed $38,255 for 63.55 hours of work in connection with the deposition of County Legislature Majority Leader Frank Commisso, which lasted less than two hours.

The 900-page bill filled with the court in May, Marcelle argues, is the result of "either unprofessional sloppiness or an effort to conceal improper and illegal billing practices."

In one footnote, the county offers to make county Comptroller Michael Conners and District Attorney David Soares' offices available to forensically audit the attorneys' billing practices.

On Wednesday, Gibson Dunn lead attorney Mitchell Karlan wrote to the court acknowledging that 34.2 hours worth $22,449.50 had been erroneously billed to the case over the years.

But Karlan added that those hours amounted to "less than one quarter of one percent of the hours upon which Plaintiffs' fee application is based" — a sum he said was already steeply discounted from the time actually spent on the lawsuit.

At issue is how much the attorneys ought to be compensated for nearly four years of litigation that culminated in March with Senior U.S. Judge Lawrence Kahn's ruling that the county's 2011 redistricting map violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting minority voting power.

Kahn ruled the county should pay the costs of its violating the law; the question now is what constitutes a reasonable price.

The plaintiffs' lawyers argued the bill was justified in part because the length of the case was entirely the county's fault for repeatedly refusing to settle.

Two proposed settlements that would have capped the legal fees at $850,000 and $750,000, the plaintiffs argued, were scuttled by "political bickering" between county lawmakers or County Executive Dan McCoy.

Gibson Dunn is seeking $6.4 million for the work of 21 attorneys at rates as high as $1,174 an hour for Karlan, while the DerOhannesian firm, led by Paul DerOhannesian II, is seeking $552,471 at a top rate of $375 an hour.

Of the $6.96 million total, about $6.8 million is for legal fees while the rest is to pay for experts and other expenses.

The county is also arguing that there is no legal justification for Gibson Dunn charging New York City legal rates upstate and that the lawyers did not properly establish why Gibson Dunn was needed in the case at all.

Both firms successfully sued the county in a similar case in 2003 and were awarded no more than $210 an hour for their top lawyers. In that case, which settled before trial, the lawyers requested $483,948 and were awarded $160,000.

This time around the county argues that neither lead counsel — Karlan nor DerOhannesian — is entitled to more than $275 an hour.

DerOhannesian said the fact that no other law firm or national organization would take the case is proof that Gibson Dunn's help was necessary.

Without the resources of large firms like Gibson Dunn that can afford years of litigation without payment, he said, lengthy and expensive civil rights cases would almost never be tried.

Again, he laid the blame at the feet of county officials who violated the law and then refused to recognize it.

"This litigation, which was four years in duration, was because of the county's recalcitrance," he said.